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Same day a while ago Nicole Daunic asked me a questions, a questions she asked to a bunch of people, maybe even several questions. Maybe she liked to asked the questions or perhaps it was somebody who asked her to ask them, at some point they showed up on a blog on critical correspondence hosted by NY based dance organization Movement Research. Here it is now replay on Spangbergianism, not really in the classical format but might be you just enjoy it on a Sunday afternoon.

1) What are the most potent questions/ ideas prompted by the recent coming together of dance and the visual arts?

Good question, is not a bad answer, but hmmm maybe one could elaborate slightly, though this question probably would extend into PhD-type size. What you have in front of you is an answer of all together three hundred and sixty four page, but I’ll try my best to abbreviate just a bit.

Aha, call me Sherlock, perhaps the answer is hidden in the question? Elementary—nope. No deduction, hawkeyes or good will help here. First, dance and visual art have been neighbors and engaged for a long time. Pronto, it’s rather a curse running through the last 100 years. It’s more like dance and visual art were in family therapy for a while and now are back in business, rejuvenated by some NY shrink that can hardly spell “psychoanalysis”. You know, the RLGB method. These sessions have been very good for all involved, but the question is: how healthy, sustainable and demanding is it? After all, the shrinks of art in general are frighteningly normative. And, is risk not a term completely erased from the vocabulary of the artist? But, then again, if it is healthy etc. that’s not really a smashing opportunity, since we know where it’s about to end—yep, in more of the same. However, in the arts in general, and in this mess in particular, there are serious issues to mind in regards to power, maneuverability, accountability, business opportunities and grand application, which somehow always ends up with everybody blaming each other—including me—when in fact what we need is neither backstabbing nor politeness, but more and worse badass. We need a therapist [curators etc.] that answers to nothing else than remorselessness and knows how to light up the BBQ. We need dancers, choreographers and artists who any shrink et al. since Papa Freud would lock up and throw away the key. No, no, we don’t need dancers and whatever that are complacent, nor simply against—way too easy. What we need are folks that don’t shy away from complexity and problems. The new hot cool choreography and dance in the museum is a fabulous opportunity, but only if it is taken seriously enough, only if we dare go dirty, you know what I’m sayin’?

And, on that bombshell [don’t flatter yourself, dude] an important question to ask is: what’s different this time, especially considering larger perspectives both in respect of art history, but more importantly in relation to our politico-economical reality? Only if we—whoever we might be—articulate a proposal to that question can this new affair grow into a love story. Cuz like, it’s not cuz some or a few visual art curators suddenly developed some dance mania, were so overwhelmed by an amazing dance piece, or even melted in front of an oh-so-fascinating choreographer that moved into a loft in SoHo like right after the war—and I mean the Civil War. Choreography and dance’s response to being invited to the museum is similar to having a skeptical, or shall we say, passive-aggressive relation to theatre, which obviously is a good thing. Luckily, Wim Vandekeybus will never enter the museum. Nor will Sasha Waltz or Alain Platel, but I’m probably wrong cuz there are certainly enough lost curators out there. Good luck. The choreography and dance that correlates to the museum is emphasizing abstraction and form, the rest is there because it’s good for political reasons exterior to the work itself.

In any case the reason for this sudden passion can easily be correlated to our present predicament: our society and its modes of governance, economic exchange and production of subjectivity, knowledge and power. Yet, this doesn’t mean that it’s all about the money, at least not first level. Already, here we bump into a problem… exactly, because this question—what’s the circumstances—is not desired (especially not by dance) based on the same equation that you don’t want to understand that your wife loves you because of your money, your pedigree or your awesome pecs. What’s necessary here is to reverse the fear and argue that if we don’t understand the circumstances for the emergence of passions, fascination, and interest, the affair will always be an affair and not an engagement, and this is of course particularly important when considering the asymmetry and hierarchical relation between the parties. Feel me?

The initial question uses the formulation “coming together”. Once and for all, I think we should wake up from the illusion that there is anything together in this set up and remember it is not visual art that is involved; it is certain institutions predominantly identified with visual art. Visual art as such is so not in it together with dance, forget about it. Dance is competitor of market shares. Pardon, but this is business and every dime that’s spent on dance is not spent on visual art or another painting exhibition. Btw, however important and significant certain artists of the past have been and might be, it’s not an excuse for always putting them in the show. How much Ana Mendiata can the world take? For godssake, Lygia Clark must be more important than Breaking Bad—how many episodes? seven hundred? She isn’t. Perhaps she could be if her stuff was digital and downloadable from piratebay, but it isn’t. It occupies space and every time there’s a Clark piece up and running, something else is not at all. We love Lygia but Jezuz, why such monogamy?

Okay, visual art hates dance and choreography and will maintain its condescending tone of voice as long as dance and choreography doesn’t speak up and go medieval on the ass of visual art or whatever. You know what I mean—tough shit. Again, it’s institutions in visual art that have a crush on dance and those that have it—they might just not know about it or are playing stupid—they have it not because of sex, but because they know that expansion and change is the name of the game and the key to a prosperous future. These institutions use dance because dance is something that can be co-opted, and damn this is not a problem, it’s even great because with this in mind negotiation can start. Check it out, we can turn it around so many times, but ultimately it’s visual art that came to dance, so who needs who? Exactly.

There is so no together here. It’s institutions in visual art that have approached dance. And, there is no mutuality, but total asymmetry: institutions against individual artists, factories against individual workers without a union. The situation most of all reminds us of a gang bang. Nice, and shit balls it doesn’t happen at the pool but in a grey meeting room on the third floor. But (and there is of course always another but, this is after all neoliberalism) but perhaps this is not about force or intensity, but about who’s on top. At the end of the day, whatever happens I’m cool with anything as long as I know dance has not turned into some sloppy bottom afraid of saying what it wants. Demands baby, demands. Who do you want to be, Miley Cyrus or, what’s her name, Sinead O’Connor?

Now back to the question: it goes without saying that potent questions should be avoided in the first place and in this case potency is different for dance and visual art, including its institutions. From the perspective of dance however… and here we need to make a disclaimer—it is not dance in general that is demanded by visual art, but only some sorts of dance (i.e. certain downtown NY dance with an affinity to pedestrian movement, French dance with a conceptual flare, certain kinds of assimilated yet ethnically challenging dance, strong formalism and Bill Forsythe (there are exceptions, but only so few, like somebody from Spain, Sweden or so).

Still from the POV of dance, the situation museum is perhaps first of all a matter of responsibility and value. Something in this direction, dance can choose several ways of responding to an invitation from a museum (and we are now thinking about exhibition spaces, not a theatre in a museum) and we are obviously not talking style, but: Do we engage the museum with a piece or proposal that before or after can be adapted to the stage? Do we bring a piece for the stage into the museum and adapt it for a walk around audience? Do we make a site specific (Help Help Help) something rethinking the form, but not the tools or modes of production? Or, do we insist on the challenge, asserting that the context forces us to rethink our practices, methods and modes of production all together (i.e. to become beginners, to not know and, as a result, ditch or give up on notions of quality, give up values)? Do we allow the museum to change what choreography can be and do, what dance can be and do (which is not what it looks like)?

If one chooses for any other approach than to challenge dance, it is my belief that we should stay home and do another one for the theatre, and give somebody else the opportunity to make a show over at MoMA. But if we do, the museum becomes a potential capacity to make it happen, but of course it’s gonna be way harder and meet way more resistance in the dance community.

What appears to happen in front of our noses is that dance as we know it is occupying the museum, without a program, without a politics, except the maintenance of dance as we know it; of dance as an established identity, something to which one can belong. Authorities and institutions of dance cannot work for something else, for the already established, and in a sector that lives from support and subsidy, deterritorialization mustn’t cost, mustn’t transform anything fundamental, the circumstances for production material and intellectual. Dance mustn’t want something from the museum, it must instead allow the museum to undo dance as we know it. Let’s give the museum permission to develop all together new forms of choreography, producing all together different expressions.

Remember, to do something specific in the museum has nothing to do with becoming a visual artist. No no, as much as it is important to emigrate, we travel with one way ticket. It is important to remain a choreographer or dancer. It is in this space of tension that something potentially can happen, the moment you are identified as a visual artist, oh my, your life is so over, then you are just one of them. And, there are thousands of them out there and as a visual artist, you not very good. Remember, in the museum you are special, you are foreign – use that, use your asymmetries against the dominant regime, now that’s winning instinct.

But, but, but—just because you call yourself a choreographer, especially in the museum, doesn’t mean that you make dances (make some people move around in more or less defined ways). Not at all and this is precisely the challenge. When choreography and/or dance moves into the museum, the game is all new and it is up to you and me to either choose : do we play with old rules, or do we refuse to fall into patterns and do what we are already so good at? Fuck no, let the museum, as so many other places, open for the wkd.

Parenthesis, in order to move on we need a distinction: Choreography and dance are not inter-dependent, they don’t need each other, they’re instead all together different and even, when at best, incompatible. Choreography is not necessarily the making of dance, nor is all dance made through choreography. Choreography is not causal to dance and visa versa. Choreography is a matter or organization, of ordering and making stable, although stability is many things. Choreography’s first enterprise is to domesticate movement. Choreography is concerned with structures and structuring, and obviously every structure needs expression. One of these expressions is dance but it is not the only expression that choreography can take on. Dance on the other hand is strategic, it is not about ordering but instead of maneuvering, of navigating through structures, through order. Dance is an expression into the world, dance is certainly organized but the organization is not the dance, it is the organization and the principles need not be choreography although they can be read through choreography. To choreograph needs have nothing to do with dance, and it goes without saying that one need not have any dance skills to choreograph [those who say so are just dance teachers afraid of losing their jobs]. Similarly, dancing is always organized but one need have no idea about choreography to make them. Recently the term choreography as expanded practice has been used emphasize how organization is non-linear to expression, choreography to dance and that choreography needs to be considered a cluster of tools that can be used both to produce and analyze autonomous to expression, i.e. choreography has become a generic set of tools, a technology or a field of knowledge. It is as expanded practice that choreography can or must approach the invitation from visual art, an approach that can give choreography any kind of from also painting, video, sound, a book, a social differentiation or something entirely else. Add to that, that only if we choreography takes on new expressions, only if dance loses itself in other organizational capacities can this meeting become sustainable and fruitful for all parties, and if not dance and choreography will continue to be mixed up and pushed around like a bastard cousin from the countryside, tip top for Saturday entertainment but never invited to the green room, never to the real deal.

Several institutions have initiated conversations around the collection of dance and choreography. Museums desire to acquire dances and put them in the collection, a good or even excellent idea. What’s not in the collection doesn’t exist but again… when understood as collectible the address is only dances in the classical sense of the word and the general idea, since a dance in itself can not be stored away [hello, remember Peggy Phelan?], is to collect documents and put them all in the archive section. Fuck that, if dance and choreography are to be put, so to say, in the basement it’s not in some archive section but the museum and choreographers must develop a method to store work that is it’s own. A starting point is to consider that choreography and dance is not causal and, second, to understand choreography as expanded practice.

Further, as much as a conventional collection is in need of house holding or strategy and definition, so does a collection of dances and choreographies. And a collection is not good or better if its starting point is the 60’s and New York. These oldies just want to secure their retirement money and their legacy. To collect is not only about fastening the past, it is also about producing futures.

Look at this and it’s facts. When guys or whatever exit prison after a really really long time it’s been like aha statistically proven that they fall in love unconditionally no way back kind of thang with girls or whatever same age as the inmate was when he got locked up. Yup, tattooed all over the place, skinny and guilt ridden out looking for babes twenty-five years younger [OMG look whose talking]. Great.

Look at this too, one wonders why some kind of personality, women or whatever fall in love head of heels, deeply convinced with inmates, prisoners, jailbirds yeah with all of the whatever they are called. But why? But why? Why fall in love with a dude doomed to decades in Sing Sing – which would be quite cool, or worse with some lowbrow BS thug rotting away in a small town correctional facility in Kumla or Switzerland. This is wkd. But wow, art made with inmates that’s even worse.

I don’t care whatever, some silly senior waiting for his locked up girlfriend, OMG – not if some size D bra [as in dramatic] honey pie that feel in love with Steve the convict already before acne age. No way, I mean the real shit, men and women that fall in love with inmates tout court, and gosh I love them [that’s what I do – fall in love with men and women falling in love with men and women imprisoned – who’s a perv now?], but still why? This is irrational to begin with, and aha we know love is something we do, anyway why wouldn’t the prisoner have figured it out – to fall in lourve with a quarter of century younger chicalinda is gonna be trouble and it’s not gonna be nice trouble, and the other way around, relative capitalism, to fall in love with a prisoner is like stashing your matrass with money and hope for interest. Dead capital, schtupid, but… and they might just be closely connected – they still do it, they still do it again and again.

Concerning the inmate, when on the inside he or she is closed off from reality, access to certain capacities is denied. The, let’s say babe that he doesn’t have access to on the outside becomes a thing that the inmate comprehends without ground, time and context is withdrawn or subtracted – the object of desire, however abstract, become “pure” intensity without being. The being part of the female is removed, cancelled, annulled and there is only “doing” – comprehension left. Kind of like, there’s only womanness and no woman, there might be a lot of sex but nobody having it. Blim blam, this is the price to pay for pure and wonderful comprehension, or call it phantasy – you’re doomed to fall in love again and again with what the thing as intensity.

Let’s turn it around, the same goes for the one falling in love with the inmate, that obviously and of course must ditch the guy when he exits the can, which might or not be sweet: the moment he exits the can and gains ability, when he can again, the one on the outside can’t any more… what a dance, cancan. But first, why would anybody fall in love with somebody that’s locked up for the rest of his life… and why would anybody fall in love with somebody that’s looked for the rest of his life because he stabbed somebody – or like a bunch of supermodels, fifty-one times in the chest, including the eye, ate their hearts raw with sushi rice and low sodium soy, didn’t even bother to do something weird like you know, some fucked up code written in blood or liked waxed the supermodels’ legs before dumping them outside the Polish embassy, and OMG got caught driving a stolen Daihatsu. Check it out – I said baby some day luck comes in your arms – there is a rational here, namely it’s not the deeds, not the actions, not the spectacle or even love out of pity, you remember the Daihatsu. Nope, the point is to disconnect the deed from the man, the comprehension part from the being part. Love is blind, probably true but in this case blind can be seen as voluntary, self-determined, aha. Yes, you fall with the man, not the the the deed, you fall in love with the being part and abandon the comprehension part, the doing, the action. Exactly, you fall in love with being pur and eradicate intensity. It’s fuckin brilliant, you fall in love with the man and not that BS macho schtuff, chew on that Amigo, and it’s brilliant cuz what you love – being – is exactly void of risk, chance and danger, you can love endlessly and as much as you like since being, so to say, isn’t exactly able to escape, ditch you, be unfaithful and so on. What you dig when you fall for a prisoner is being without intensity – the man, the sex, the love, the smell whatever but aha there is no doing, no engagement – a love completely static and hence at least trivially perfect.

Yet, both the prisoner out of the can and the lover of the jailbird in side are quite phab, they might sound fucked up and somewhat self-obsessive although in two different ways. They are awesome as they kind of separate love from like, if we consider that you love somebody for the way they are – being – and like somebody because of what they do – intensity. It’s tidy, fair an no blurry double speech. I mean the individual in love with the prisoner – being – is not about to say: “Well you know, lately I feel that we’ve grown apart…” and the great thing with the convict out of the joint is that he likes all young women equally as long as they coincide with his comprehensions, with a certain intensity. In other words, the inmate likes what the thing is in and the so called crazy-ladies are in love with what is in the thing.

Now look at this, what about art? Art is certainly great and amazing, more of it totally, the fucked up situation is that art today tendentially is asked, demanded, forced, desired to be both being and intensity – it should both be art as in the sense of “autonomous” being and know itself as intensity, i.e. it should exists as such and be conscious about its own being at the same time, but check it out, not possible not even a little bit possible. Something cannot be itself and know itself at the same time, something can not maintain itself as that which is in the thing and that which the thing is in. No sir, that’s some sort of Hegelian absolute, some fucked up metaphysical existence that not even Lovecraft dare de-de-describe. Bring in a mirror, and hocus pocus what do we get, yep – an art that is both and at the same time autonomous, i.e. is without determination, and is politically intensive or engaged, i.e. intensive without determined, object. Or in other words an art that at the same time should be art and not-art. Obviously an autonomous art can’t simply and no way perform a politics, and it doesn’t matter if this darkness of general NL is posed by art councils, curators, policy makers, more curators, artists, teachers, scholars [oh no not Goldsmiths again], biennale offices, socially engaged artists [stop them now – and spit on Woody Allen too], it is never the less fucked up and produce an art that is both conservative and valuable for something determinable. Nausea alert, and jezuz, this implies an art that’s like design, – beautifully useful, aha – something like a bad wine being opened with a beautifully useful corkscrew suddenly transforming the shit wine into a Chatieau Lafite.

Go away, go away, curse – art needs to go to jail, yep on the double and both in the sense of Monopoly and metaphorically to the beginning, to the eradication of resources, to uselessness, a waste of time and the whole lot. Check it out just because and art is not useful, it doesn’t say that it doesn’t do a lot of things to the artist, spectator, viewers, museum bosses, curators, magazine, politics, social injustice, the world, the universe and so on, but the moment when art does or wish to determine what it does it has a problem, it becomes good or bad, what matters, comparable, a matter of investment and affordance and what is it then… if not – helpful, nice, sympathetic, diplomatic, didactic, didactic didactic. More over it means that art also can or must be judged in respect of, funded in respect of, approved through etc. it’s usefulness, it’s functionality and respect for and of society. No no no, an art should and must be utterly useless, it cannot and must not keep anybody busy – I must not know what it is good or bad for but it will and must also and at the same time provoke comprehension, responses, relations, irritation, pleasure, anger, sleep, political upraising, revolution, neoliberalism, love and so on and that’s all superb and amazing. Art can not not be comprehended but it’s job, or responsibility, is not to know and determine determination, when it does it seizes to be art and art specific.

Art needs to go to jail. It can only and either be art as being – autonomous and useless, perhaps also harmless – as in the sense of the prisoner with which you fall in love – and certainly art is institutionally inscribed and imprisoned but it can be in more than many ways – and never mind if it wasn’t – what what what – yes and it is totally fine [art obviously deeply need institutions whatever they are called Tate modern, art councils, dance venue, iTunes etc] – and on the other hand an art that is “pure” intensity which the prisoner now released like, adore and worship without selection – namely comprehension or politics without object, without circumstances. Now, just because art need to go to jail no matter what, that doesn’t not mean the artist, somebody producing art whatever that is [except theatre which we shouldn’t do at all and is certainly not made by artists], should be anything else than deeply and utterly engaged in whatever he or she likes and feel urgency in respect of. Just because the job of art must be to be useless no matter what being or intensity, doesn’t say that the artists’ job is the same – rather the opposite – hyper conscious about what artistic production implies, politically, socially, ethically, ideologically, fluidity, economically, reformist, revolutionary, poetically, historically, in relation to a bit of smoke and so on until the end of it all. But just because I know what I’m doing doesn’t say that the art produced should be causal to that knowing [obviously whatever knowing, physical, sensual, spiritual etc.], in fact it shouldn’t in any respect what so ever [art is not there to make the viewer admire the author]. Art, especially in respect of NL and semio-capitalism must be sent to jail, it must give itself permission to evacuate economy [which is not the same as exiting art markets, they are fine and they are not dealing with art but schtuff], negotiation, affordance and investment, context, policy, friendship and most of all belonging and identity in order to produce new or other kinds of experiences, produce difference in kind, if not it will be stuck in what is already possible, inscribed, fine, digested, perfectly Starbucks, difference in degree, different with a c, bailed out, business minded and so on. Art needs to go to jail in order to maintain its structural simplicity, its n’importe quoi – it needs to allow itself limits, or it will fall into the poisonous territory of strategy, making it causal to something that matters more or less, less or more, to value which is always opportunistic to some power. Go to jail, and do it now. The production of limits, which is not to dismiss, evacuate, eradicate and so on, limits between being and comprehension, not limits between this or that identity, no fuckin way, limits of with bearing on ontological characteristics, these are limits of existence not about life or consciousness, or good mood. Art needs to go to jail to save itself from politics, policy, performativity and polite causalities and most of all from vague instrumentality and the politics of ethics, inclusion and good life. Art is not alive, it doesn’t have life, it exists and it doesn’t care. To love art is like loving somebody you know you can never have, the love of a being no matter what.

Sharing, how many times do I have to hear it? [A question mark in the first sentence, not a good thing.] The importance of sharing, new forms of sharing, shared resources, knowledge sharing, web pages for sharing, file sharing, sharing fuckin’ everything – except perhaps the bed, if you know what I mean – why do we only consider safe sex, free sex and group sex and never shared sex. Seriously gööööö – of course I’m into it – but shit goddamn shared sex must be some sort of mashup between let’s look at X-hamster together, an AA meeting series of tear-sucker confessions, i.e. aha this is 2013 confession equals telling your bio, and a bunch of people jerking off making sure not to come. In any case I love sex… [OMG, get out of town – TMI – no no TMS – Too Much Sharing] – sharing has become the new ubiquitous of the sophisticated classes, I don’t mean the dirty to be condemned shit heads that has no name financial capitalism, no I mean the sophisticated that I’m knee deep in shit with, that work in the creative sector, that discuss cultural policy, the apply for grant [or if they don’t know how to, reject the very idea of application, seriously], that react in a the person is political kind of way to new forms of disguised [more or less] contemporary racism, genderism and innocent concessions to extreme right parties sitting on just couple but yet positions in our parliaments. I mean those the conscious, the educated, the ones that don’t know what KFC is an abbreviation of and pride themselves with food related intolerances [but make faces anytime when tolerance is mentioned in any respect in relation to humans or politics]. I mean myself most of all, but I also mean the naïve and amazing believing in social movement, the ones that consider NGO something good per se, those that consider socially active art to be a good thing, helping hand and not just a narcissistic self-celebratory emptiness good for fuckin’ nothing except for further funding. I mean those that think that performativity is a good thing, something positive, something active, something eye-opening, something identity good for some something, something perhaps even – give me a seriously looong break – something subversive, something sexy, something glam, something not curatorially wet dream, something not a new territory into which visual art can expand, something alternative, something sharing. It is not!

Sharing, how how, how often – I hear sharing more frequently than Rihanna. There’s presently so much sharing around I need to get the app. Totally, I put it next to my Nike training app. Whoop whoop. Sharing like all the freakin’ time. Sharing has become the most important currency around, dollars Euro and what was that thing in Japan called – no good no more we are trading in sharing. Fuck the stock or derivatives markets we are on the sharing market. Who, Gordon Gekko… nah we like it Sean Dockray – we are sharing, and sharing is good – but look at this sharing is not good – neither is collaboration – who isn’t sharing also the really bad guys. Weapon industry also share, it’s just that they call it lobby. Europe is sharing a lot, sharing the very idea that Greece isn’t worth the trouble. But too us, the good people, sharing is good, in fact whatever it is that should be shared it is good. Jezuz, sharing has become our salvation from capitalism in general, and the neoliberal pandemonium in particular. We the sharers are not deep inside NL [you get the abbreviation, kind of KFC just a bit bigger] because we are better or something, but get it, get it – you know what – the centerfold of NL is exactly that anything goes, whatever can and must be made capital, symbolic or actual, tokens or real ass dollar bills NL doesn’t give shit, it doesn’t even give a little shit about the one or the other. There’s no laundry too dirty to wash through financial capitalism, it’s an endless state of emergence. Check it out NL and financial capitalism is like Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction”, no worse. Give me a break, do you – do we – seriously think, imagine, öhhhh that sharing is not equally and as deep as anything else in the business. Sure, we can run the errands of the present differently – there certainly is no other way to take than the wide and well paved by late capitalism but we can take it differently – but we shall of course also know that that’s what is wanted of us, we should follow the wide path in alternative ways in order to open new opportunities to more openness, further expansion – but look expansion is not a breach, it is always built on something already available and stable. Our second or whatever order problem is to differentiate between structural and strategic sharing. We need to work out modalities of sharing that are structural and formulated as ideology – or perhaps not but initially in order to develop some paradox – thus a sharing that is stable and can produce secondary orientation, an ideology of sharing can stand model for modes of production etc. for life, or hopefully not for life. A strategic model of sharing is not acceptable as it is built on needs, in other words on markets, on economy, investment and affordance. The difference here between ideology and ethic [our current political landscape] is – btw fuck affect – the problem with affect since it’s return in whatever 2005 is exactly that it’s been pushed into strategy – affect is more or less this or that – affect has been degraded from the echelon of n’importe quoi to what matters more or less – deep shit, and affect lost all it’s capacity to serious fuck us. Affect must be like art and art like affect is not supposed to do anything good or bad, not that we like it but affect is affect exactly because its not good for fuckin nothing, because it is n’importe quoi, no matter what – the moment it, even just a little closes up to efficiency, ability, technique, direction, causality, time and space it’s not n’importe quoi anymore – allé essactly n’importe quoi isn’t more or less, it just is – it doesn’t deal with consciousness, it doesn’t care about you or me, affect so goddamn doesn’t share, it’s unconditional, get it – it’s unconditional but as much as it is unconditionally generous its also the nucleus of stinchy, as much as it is pure love it’s the whole gradient to utter and pure hate, but whatever that is – in the gradient – it is it unconditionally. Affect is not composed, it’s not divided, it’s not here or there, it just is, and if at all it comes around, it doesn’t on invitation, it just shows up.

The dark ass part however is that affect is particularly close to NL, it’s like it’s first buddy, the best man at the wedding, the Thelma of freakin Louise, the Cage in Merce, the Gilbert in George, Phrenia in Schizo, the loneliness in “Just The Two Of Us”, that’s how bad it is – yep, the anthem of the merged states of exception NL and Affect will feature the sleazy soft yell-O voice of Bill Withers – consider that the next time you share anything at all. And yet, the superbness with NL is that as ubiquitous it also got immune to itself – in a certain way NL has managed to become in itself, NL is the 21st century version of a Heglian absolute. And hence, therefore and all the way, no more war machines can help us, no more nomadism [jezuz Christ] will be any good, nope – neoliberalism as post ideological affective politics can only be fought with the means of homeopathy – not in the sense of curing ourselves from NL through more of the same – but aha – through more of the same n’importe quoi – NL can not be evacuated, can not be slain, not vanquished – no smoke will clear on the battlefields – it can only be fought through more of itself as foreign to itself, homeopathically through and with affect, but even more importantly the moment we engage with affect – with unconditionality, without and zero identity, with absolutely no belonging or not, with only absolute, we must understand that NL will make everything to make affect and us, the unconditional, we who don’t share for any reason, that share only structurally and only, that fucks strategy, that fucks perspective, that is absolutely and excessively flat, completely and utterly horizontal or horizon. But no no there is no immanence here, pad de… something – there is only flatness and no matter what, n’importe quoi.

Sharing is not good, it’s just another name for networking, for affordance and investment, sharing is the 21st name for leisure, what the precarious call themselves when they return from their temporary jobs, when they return from some demonstration or occupy schtuff, or even worse after a good day in the art centre doing something even Bill Cosby would feel guilty for doing [I’m waiting for the first pedophilia case from the art world – not funny]. We don’t really want to, can’t we just admit it? We are not interested in sharing – except a few convenient versions like… Furk, I can’t come up with anything, perhaps oh yes, files are good to share, a PDF of a recent Rancière volume with democracy in the title. Stop the sharing mania and get real, sharing is not enough, it fuckin works and great, it’s pleasant and everybody is in, it has not ideology, it is only when it fits the one with bigger resources, sharing is the new version of we can’t pay you, but we share our resources also when we lack them. Sharing is just the tacky yellow sauce of economical and temporary relations, sharing is like an enchanting meadow in the dark forest – the place to which Pan doesn’t bring us but we stumble into almost like by accident – fuck that – sharing is like having a bath surrounded by candles and a glass of red wine in a too big glass that you bought in IKEA, oh my Bingo. What the fuck happened to stone me into the groove, the only version out of here, and it certainly ain’t no promise – and I’m already a reactionary after all I wrote this – is to go absolutely flat – not as a refusal you fat Italian – no way – as pure affect – as pure stone motherfuckin hard homeopathy, to go seriously n’importe quoi – just before no matter what, to not be depressed – but to produce depression as a freaking plague – yes goddamn it – no salvation, no meaning i.e. strategic regret – this is the moment we turn zombie, aha. No consciousness but pure existence, no differentiation, no identity, no qualities, no attributes – stop sharing – plague, squander, loot [fuck virus or contamination], plague, infect in all directions and with whatever, accelerate. Zombies [and I’m in love with her] don’t waste time, they don’t share, they or we – The Zombies – don’t share, don’t shop, don’t make exceptions, don’t’ invest, don’t think twice not even once, we are – without consciousness and nothing else than no matter what.

Stop your ridiculous addiction to perspective. Can’t you see, they – perspectives – are not even political, they are politics, endless negotiation, a little bit this or that, sympathetic, as reliable as they are dynamic. Göööööö. Perspectives are like bag in a box wine, the dark side of flat-rate. Fuck it, perspectives are not even politics they are the wet dreams of politicians. Perspectives are not like sex without a condom, they are like a condoms without sex. Stop having them, producing them, them em, or at least stash them away before you approach the world or and especially before you start making art. Look at this: art is not in the world or the freakin universe to do anything good or bad. It is in the world to be useless, to be everything that nothing else is or is allowed to be – to a total waste of time, excessively worthless, completely unnecessary, utterly incomprehensible which obviously has nothing to do with what kind of representations this or that art gains, which of course it has also but not yet… An art that is completely worthless, totally because because can be small, tiny, whimsical, embarrassing, oversized, fat, like an Iphone or anything whatever else, but it is still an art that is megalomanic, yes it is and exactly because it fucks perspective. Something that fuck perspective can not contain politics. Something that fucks perspective can have dynamics, can be negotiated, has no fuckin performativity, it goddamn is. Full stop, capish.

Koolhaas was wrong it is not bigness that fucks context – bigness is still inscribed, still more or less than some something, fuck bigness because bigness fucks no nothing except the smaller version, bigness is still a perspective however expanded, augmented or deconstructed – what really fucks context is exactly the annihilation of perspective, any form of comparison, any form of contextual differentiation. An art this useful or in any respect produces ethically just representations is by definition benevolent to this world, is already backslapping with governments, realistic this or that, reason and the lot.

Fuck yeah, we love and adore grass-root, alternative, community, social, ecological, even identity politics and kickstarter but look at this, we love it as much as we love art, but it is not the same goddamn love, get it. You know, I love my mother, I adore her – even if she forced me to eat granola as a kid and didn’t bother to cook me porridge [god I hate her] and I still consider her the only mother of this world for-evah evah and eva-evah, I would die for her – twice – but that doesn’t say I’m gonna make any art – any at all art – about, in awe of, because of or anything in the direction her. My mother is great and fab but thank fuckin god that she is not in my art – of course she is yeah yeah I’m her son, sure, but let this be the lesson: love politics, people, social injustice, fairplay, fairtrade, fairway, unemployed teenagers, tuition fees, free sex, gay parades, automotive industry, zero emission, love it all and be concerned but don’t make it your art, don’t even make it halfway in there, not even a little or just a little a little, don’t don’t don’t – please – it’s an altogether something else and that is good. Art and life is not to be together, but strictly separated. Art is in the world and that’s all good but it doesn’t say that the world should be in art, on the contrary it is when the world is not in the art that art can do something about the world, but not and exactly, not as perspective but unconditionally, as fuck context, as the obliteration of perspective. It is not part of art’s job description to be good or bad for anything, the job of art is to be horizon – undivided full circle and irreversible – it’s job is to become flat, extremely flat. So flat there can be nothing more to add, and it exactly when there is nothing to add that the world changes – fuck addition what’s needed is a non-additive identity in the last instance.

And in any case stop being a concerned person, if you really were you’d stop making art long ago. And know this, resistance is over – financial capitalism swallowed it and will continue to swallow and swallow – critique is over – guess what, financial capitalism swallowed it and will swallow it again – activism – guess what, financial capitalism swallowed that too and will swallow it again – like why were there no Seattle events since 1998 – because financial capitalism swallowed it – what about the word – the word is free – sure, but financial or semio-capitalism swallowed that too. Stop having hopes for Christ’s sake, what is the freakin world that you hope for in any case – the 80s whatever that was, the 70s and Jonny Rotten, the 60s and hippies, the 50s anti-communism – what do we hope for – do we want to go back there, to hidden away sexual difference, to a time before all the failed but still liberational movement, do we want to go back to a time when we listen to music from a cassette player and learned language from our mothers and Clement Greenberg ruled the art world. Do we really want to go back to a time when 99% of all artist were men and hetero, what do we hope for, if we do, if not for an altogether other world. Really what do we hope for than an altogether different here and now. Really what do we hope for than an altogether different human being, one that is in no respect a relative to us or me. Do we really have hope for a just liberalism, do we really have hope for desire based on lack, do we really have hope at all. I mean isn’t hope the worst of all possible ways of losing track, of getting lost, hope is a cute version of resignation, hope is the believers way of saying tolerance, hope is the acceptance of one’s own insignificance. And you, you call your schtuff art. Shape the fuck up.

Yes I know I’ve said this before, but once was apparently not enough. What what? In 1972 Delueze and Guttari screamed creativity to the people, fluidity is everything, we need becoming, BwO’s, wolf packs, circus people, difference with both a c and a t, canals, smooth space even Patti Smith and the means to use was schizophrenia – suddenly everything could be and mean everything at the same time all the time, schizo was the fluidization of the whole chebang – fuck the referent, good night index – this was dynamics, becoming is everything and relative relative relative. In 1990 or whatever identity politics scream – with a vulnerable subject – everything is meaning even and especially you, your body and your participation in the world never mind the participation of the world in you – oh yes, now we all needed to reify and mean, signify and say “No, I’m not heterosexual, I practice heterosexuality… “ – the generative capacity was oh no no no performativity – a sort of live version of becoming or no more BwO’s but rather Organs without Bodies, magical – the structural dynamism embraced by D/G – Fuck Butler but oh fine she was only a victim of her time – and now it all turned into strategic dynamism – smart… naaaht. And what was the means – well nobody really said it out loud, but yesh you did it – flip D/G and the truth is standing in front of the main entrance – essactly – the means to strategic dynamism – which obviously is a nice way of saying self-obsessed self-peformance – was paranoia – yeup – no more everything is everything – but instead – everything is this and this is me. Sweet.

But they were cool, totally cool and damn successful. The only disaster with D/G and Butler is that all they every proposed came true just in the wrong way, in a seriously wrong way. What they did in their own and scholarly way was to – perhaps not Butler but I’m open minded today [OMG stop performance studies now!] – was sincere and even aggressive attempts toward the eradication of perspective, however just for a moment but it was done on the brink of the abyss. Chapeau, big time [did I just use that expression, chapeau, fuckin’ bingo]. An art that issue creativity no, but what about one that does particularity, no no no. All swallowed over and out. Everything is everything is good bye and so is self-performance. Salvation is over and so is meaning, modernism is past tense and so is post-structuralism, deconstruction and whatever version. Expansion is over and so is compression. What we have is sense, and I’m speaking sense qua sense, and sense qua sense can’t be anything and must that is absolutely and excessively useless both concerning substance/salvation and meaning. Sense doesn’t hope, or at least it is not the hope of something, so not a hope with direction, teleology, missing, longing, it is hope as hope, hope no matter what, and it is not nice or ugly, bad or stripped naked – it just is.

What we need is not an art that fights the current predicament, not an art that feels good because it thinks it makes resistance or is lite crazy, if you know what I mean [aha, une petit] – we don’t need an art that fights the liberal subject with or against, we need an art that instead embraces exactly both the for and against in favor of an excessive weakness – we need an art that is so weak it is one step from self-annihilation, one step from – and it can’t get closer – from whatever, from being just something, however something no matter what and nothing more nor less [stop the kitschy more than one]. An art something but and still specific, an art that ask for and not attention, that do or don’t keep you busy, that care and don’t and at the same time, and art contradictory and not, cue and no. An art that is just something no matter what, and thus also and necessarily is one step from abandoning perspective, losing itself in horizon but thus also becoming alone, an art sans perspective is singular – in respect of presence – it is always alone, but then always is only always and not once in a while.

This is not an art that looks for a great outdoors, no way immanence, curse curse curse [KJ I love you] to eternal return and the goddamn virtual, and certainly not one that looks for Derrida and especially not at all Baudrillard [help me curse]. It is an art that has understood the modus operandi with which neoliberalism proposes whatever an shuns it and it’s performativity. This is an art that looks for a flat ontology, and absolutely – and I mean it – flat ontology – neither one above [transcendence] nor one below [immanence], it is a flat ontology in the middle and in the midst, totally fuckin mainstream – whoop whoop – yep – A sort of immanence from behind and in the middle and that forever appreciates without perspective the multiverse of perturbation of and within the flat. It isn’t a proposing for potentiality but as it is flat it cannot not be approached as pure potentiality, it becomes an affective [in the evil sense of the world] necessity.

This is an art that doesn’t give a shit about the emancipation of spectators but in and through its infinite regress – excessive and exponential weakness [which is not a refusal] – emancipates itself no matter what into something but something no matter what.

So CU later, schizo and paranoid, flat ontology is a critical depression or de-pression [did I just write something with a damn – in it in it, stop me]. It’s utter flatness proposes an equality between every thing no matter what, an absolutely flat, a depression where everything is just something and alone. Flat ontology or critical depression exposes a world without qualities or attributes a world or an art that is flat, that is horizon, and absolutely useless world, that can only show up and take shape. It is not an art that makes you depressed it is an art that is flat and is depressed, but what it makes you is not its business, it’s just something no matter what and it makes you make you something no matter what, contingently.

The Vampire and the werewolf are creatures of hope. Vampires look for salvation and werewolves for meaning, fuck em all. What we need in zombie art, yes sir one more time [and I’m love with her, not again – no it’s still the first one]. Zombies have no hope – they don’t need another side, they don’t want to die, they don’t feel repentance, they have no consciousness they are freed from life], they are not subjects, they are de-individualized, they are absolutely and only flat, they are just something no matter what. They don’t choose their victims, they don’t regret their deeds, they are flat absolutely flat, and look for not fuckin nothing except sense – to become depressed is to turn into zombie, there is no hope, no return, only perturbation, but critical depression, or de-pression, art as flat thing – and that has no time – by necessity must introduce itself in time and space, but who knows and contingently what qualities and attributes the aesthetics experience gain then. Its not you and me that should turn into zombies, we already are, it is the art that should be zombie, totally fuckin flat and just something, and we should make it to make our spectators into zombies, no to give them peromission to become excessively weak, depressed and zombie, to let them not be themselves more than something for a while, in favor for an entirely new mind set, the possibility of a world, a terrain [a non-flat] where everything and the rest is otherwise. Fuck yeah, zombie art.

Amnesia is quite cool. I like it, but why – which of course is obvious – does Hollywood need to make this phab phenomena so terribly one dimensional. I like that too, totally and save me from a smart version Wes Anderson with Bill Murray as, what about, melancholic sports coach one day sans past, or von Trier, the possibility is of course is if not all his films are amnesia and like not about. Hmmm maybe not all of them or perhaps only one or a half, but they are anyway von Trier movies so it really doesn’t matter. What about, what’s his name, the French dude Gondry, or did he stop making movies – wait a second – when did, I can’t remember last time I heard about or anything about him. After that that one, what’s it called – I forgot… hmmm it was a bit like Massive Attack wasn’t it, but the cast was nice. Look at this, I think it’s freakin brilliant, the actors of that movie whatever but you know with that guy, yeah essactly Cable Guy, Ace Ventura, Mask and like the centerfold of the magazine Sleaze as the super loser and the savior come evil mega bitch with a pleasant face is Kate Winslet, which at least moi can not detach from Titanic and “I’m the king of the world” sort of crucifixion scene in the front of th-that ship mixed up with “Sense and Sensibility” – Austinian morals a purrfect compliment – maybe she wasn’t in any other movies oh yes Ophelia in Branagh’s Hamlet. This is already quite sparkles, Ace Ventura meats Rose DeWitt and the abysmal romance “–I will never let you go…” – what the fuck is this and here it comes, the assistant of the memory eraser thingy company, the tiny guy who steals Winslet’s panties, OMG yes yes yes, that’s what ever his name could be from goddamn Lord of The Rings – Frodo, for Chrst’s sake, the ring bearer transformed to a pantie sniffing misfit with a jazz beard. Elijah Wood, who’s your career consultant? Daniel Radcliff? Aha, I get it Macaulay Culkin. With that cast Gondry’s movie turns 360 from bad to badass. Hardcore and obviously the film is all about amnesia, temporary or not, as choice or artificially arranged, but it doesn’t matter the aesthetics of the film just is one too mucho of wannabe indigo kitsch, it’s just not an option. Gondy is like a parent that would like to smoke a joint with the daughter and her teenage friends.

Amnesia, we all know the set up, either it’s the hero waking up in a basement some somewhere and he remembers nuttin’ but have a magnum in his right hand and a mystical code tattooed on a place of the body that gives him opportunities to show off his six pack. This is scratch and now it’s just a matter of chasing down the past and appropriate it, whatever that means. The alternative is the anti-hero geek nerd Rob Schneider type that wakes up in the same place and the story unfolds similarly except that the side-kick will finally function as side-kick, substitute to his lost past. The memory of the girl, the touch, the smell was either planted in the right place – Blade Runner [btw isn’t the Gondry what was it now now name film a sort of poetic appropriation of Ridley Scott’s movie, only difference is that Kate Winslet has fused into both Rachel (Sean Young who “accidentaly” also is in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Conspiracy alert) and Pris -Daryl Hannah], or there never was one – amazing – but it doesn’t matter cuz after waking up it’s the same, once ascending from darkness time and space is back to basics and voila, hit the road.

It’s this this that I can’t take, why when the hero wakes up is linear again linear and he, rarely she, is all okidoki except he doesn’t remember his name – it’s always only memory and recognition that is gone, not language or like the ability to throw a freakin knife really really hard and good – damn that one is a good amnesia movie – aha – what yes sir Geena Davies in The Long Kiss Goodnight with Samuel Jackson who also suffers form some sort of trauma, yesh these films are fucked up Freudian [spit on Woody Allen], and this is what’s so boring, but that Geena Davies thing is awesome except the end and the embarrassing child, still the set up is the same – Geena wakes up blank like a bimbo up stairs and one days happily married memories starts to come back, just for example that knife story throwing.

I’m into something slightly less cosy, something that would make a terrible movie, but check this out our guy – hero or not – wakes up but instead of waking up to, Oh my God, I have no me-moriee. Our guy wakes up to an endless series of waking ups. In other words not an amnesia you wake up from but one that goes on and its like you wake up to each and every moment, and the next it’s all erased again, and the next and the next. Evelything and every passing moment is all the time absolutely new or whatever – nö-thing what so ever has continuity except amnesia. Get that, each and every moment is absolutely new. It’s not that oh shit I don’t recognize my wife, or whoever tells me she is, but this one is like I lose my wife ever moment again and again, every moment and fuckin forever. Continuous and repeated amnesia, and still, consider that speech is not touched so you can speak but at every moment you could have said anything what so ever utterable but you can absolutely not recall anything at all at any moment. No no, this not just going brain dead, it’s worse – this is like waking up at every moment from brain dead, it’s continuous amnesia. This is like “I don’t believer in the Devil. / You should, cuz he believes in you” see what I mean – this is the revenge model fierce. It is indeed one reason why we don’t want to hang out in utopia, this is the first version of life in no-space, a totalitarian lack of both history and future that only exists as excessive presence as now and now and now and now.

“-Hey, what now? I’m authentic enough…” Buddy, there’s nothing you can do but continue do more of the same and authentic. To go authentic is like becoming Dan Graham, more of the same at Hauser & Wirth, or something. Poor dance folks from back then, every freakin day more authentic, what a curse – what do you prefer, authentic or amnesia – well, check it out same thing just that amnesia seems to show up through the back entrance. Authentic is by proxy good [so it seems even during and after Derrida, like behind all that relative schtuff], amnesia is deeply fuckin wrong. I say, wrong!

Yet and luckily freedom is never that all over, even in the 70s we could take a break from authentic. Contemporary thought however appears to – look whose talking – forget that part about financial or ubiquitous capitalism, we are locked up and there’s no way out, we are so fucked we have learned to like it, opportunities for a life otherwise is not just past tense it’s com-ple-teley over and increasing. But is it and how? We’ve all become young girls on a shopping craze resurrecting all and every scent of capitalism at every and so on moment. Vis some kind of line up from “I studied with Althusser“ – Badiou- to “Yes, I was close to Guttari” – Bifo -, critical theory, “Hello, my name is Stefano Harey” [I love you, dude] and a splash of Occupy Wall Street, a sense of a word of warning, or “let me tell you” speech appears to be evolving, but as we all know a warning, correction, condescending sentence, criticality á la Goldsmiths is not gonna produce any thing more than more warnings, corrections, condescending word and coagulations of power. We have entered amnesia already, it’s just that we, the ordinary hasn’t realized it yet, you the young hasn’t gotten the picture, but you know what I think, no I know, it’s the other way around, those scholars and intellectuals – including architects, a lot of them [OMG such consolidation suckers – stop thinking about buildings, houses, territories, design and have a Red Bull, just stop] are totally stuck with modes of navigation that is not valid anymore, they consider the world in ways contemporary people don’t and not anymore. Get real – especially the art world, university system and holy fuckin smokes the dance business [don’t even think about it] – you are asking the wrong questions and in the wrong way. You know what we don’t need your authorization. Look at this, just because we don’t learn language from our mothers we haven’t abandoned her, fuck no we have established new models of love. Just because big bucks and some hippies in France have turned us into young girls [they are just dirty old men writing from a safe place] it doesn’t mean we don’t know about it and use it, it’s just that you guys don’t see it happening and how. We don’t use your maps, we don’t follow your political agendas, we are not against that which you are for, we are not part of your world, not your political unconscious, not your imaginarium – we love you but have nothing more to say, we adore you but we are not afraid and your words scare us only in the same way as Hollywood movies – because we want to and like it. You are vampires that hunt during twilight and as individuals, you still believe in origins and language, we are different, we are zombies, we don’t hunt we plague. We don’t seek redemption deceiving virgins to pity us, we don’t operate with and through categories as such, we don’t look for a return, we don’t care about life or eternity – we are forever as such and itself and hence don’t need it. A critical stance however it is or not criticality BS is by definition producing a location and that location is known both before during and after. We can not mourn, not even the workers, but we can neither go on – I can’t go on I must go on – no way but as you guys mourn, warn and feel sexy hooking up with occupy movements we’ve used up our imagination and burnt the maps, our modes of life are not organized, oriented, discussed, mapped, demonstrated, activisted, what or how, it’s not Goldsmiths, Marxist, SR or triple O, it’s in and out at the same time or is just not concerned, it is music and sports, culture and administration, it doesn’t make a difference between mainstream and indie [OMG, twice]. This is the point, the way we live is not compatible with your universe. It’s not that we left it – but that conference was really quite embarrassingly reactionary – we are still in there but incompatible, we are a multitude that forgot the part of dominant discourse. We do or don’t believe in the future – that is a tendency already established, with bumps perhaps but not broken. We don’t believer in the future, and certainly not yours. You have nothing to project on us and we don’t – project. We don’t believe in the future, we have raised the stake, we believe the future. We are zombies. We plague, infest, overwhelm for no reason, because because, and that is how we don’t just survive but are rich. You know, it doesn’t matter if you tell us we are suffering, like psychoanalysis told me that I wanted to fuck me mother, we don’t go there, we are past it, and we are shining shining shining.

If Zizek and his buddies told us that it’s easier to imagine the apocalypse, we have no problems… we have as little problems with imagining a way out of capitalism as Zizek appears to have zero problem with imagining a way out of thought, philosophy or critique. We are using another mindset. We are in another state. This is the problem, aha – imagination is not a priori open, it is an openness (imagination is complicit with the possible), imagination can not conquer imagination, so let’s not fight imagination nor capitalism but let’s just stop using it, stop considering it as anything else than a tool, an instrument, part of the camouflage, internal to the spectacle, stop having problems and use it in respect of how obsolete it really is – imagination, capitalism and fuck yeah, apocalypse too.

There are no ways out of liberty or freedom, these are both tendencies of totalitarian regimes so what comes after authentic, what’s after liberty itself? It cannot be rule neither convention – which obviously restricts and breaks the vow. A paradigm shift, or a breach of knowledge, a fissure in the symbolic order is like a classical revolution or upraising always followed by a moments euphoria, of an excessive sense of liberty and then… if not rule and convention, what is left is a technical aspect, a praxis of making the common foreign not to restrict or cage but in a sense tame or domesticate liberty, authenticity or improvisation. Technique could be seen as a coagulation of liberty itself, technique offers or gives direction not in favor of something, not as instrument or the ability to transform a third party – sure you train karate to be able to defend yourself or whatever – but in the case of liberty’s technique or techniques of authenticity or dance improvisation are not techniques as means of gaining teleology, or to give traction to these liberties or capacities of liberty but instead to practice liberty or improvisation as foreign to itself, or turn the argument around technique becomes a means of surveillance. Technique is often concerned with rigor but it is a rigor to itself as itself, technique is concerned with possibility, it maintains imagination, it organizes domesticity.

It is obviously impossible to produce outside imagination or language, but if technique is a path or trajectory, some kind of identitairian capacity that keeps us busy, and in any case technique implies comparison and a departure from politics (in whatever sense). Let’s recall Foucault for a sec. he doesn’t dig into techniques of the self but indeed technologies and there are reasons immediately detectable. Foucault in general rejects strategic levels of thought or production, indeed except in interview, Foucault refuses to pass a helping hand, he refuses to guide, produce trajectory or keep us busy. Foucault is a structuralist – and thanks big Bingo for that – his job is to unveil open capacities for the reader, transparencies to be utilized in whatever way, not maintained as politics or modes of control. Foucault exposes over a generic dispositive – knowledge, power and subjectivity – circumstances for perspective, strategy, organization, governance etc. To Foucault technique is slippery, heteronormative, negotiated, strategic, nouveau riche, reactionary, relational, identity-sucking baloney whereas technology is a landscape, a state [rather than a mode of acting] or non-directional territory, that is open and doesn’t confirm or keep us busy. Technique demands something from us whereas technology minds its own business and let’s us be whatever.

The emancipation dance struggled for and possibly obtained, was not restricted and is still not [at least not as dance], but what instead happened on a broad level is the return of technique, however this time not as rule or convention but an ability to confirm given or obtained liberty. Improvisation in particular, and especially in New York at least since Ronald Reagan entered the oval office has been subject to an endless violation by and through technique. Yet, if dance techniques proper fundamentally were about homogenization and erasing the dancer as subject etc. techniques post 1981 have been all about allowing the dancer to engage in his or her subjectivity, it is a training in openness, based on a notion of difference as something benevolent per se. Technique in dance in other words has become a mean to maintain multiplicities, of maintaining the police, liberty. The liberties that dance struggled for has over the last thirty year, increasingly and with higher speed been consolidated from the inside through the elaboration of techniques, by strategies of control and organization. This is not necessarily something altogether negative, but it should be clarified that technique always is productive within certain circumstances and obviously any and all technical training by definition consolidates a territory. Technique implies the production of neurotic subjects, and secures forms of development embedded in capitalism or psychoanalysis, namely the necessarily parricidal subject, which is a great addition since the parricide at best is a form of deconstruction and not emergence or multitude.

Same thing with technology in art in general – use technology for Christ’s sake and all of them but don’t ever let technology represent itself. Fuck yeah, technology is super duper and always ape nuts cool and awesome – even small scale shit – high res, low res, porn res, wifi, kaoss pad, tiger paw, mountain lion – but watch the fuck out, the moment technology goes on stage or sits in the museum – yes sir, it transforms by automation from technology to technique, from landscape to path, from form to content, from background to action, to some form of instrumentality, some form of strategy that wants something from the viewer or spectator, if noting else – attention. S h i t, in every sense, and how damn boring. Yet, there’s no choice really cuz if this process doesn’t kick in there can exist no property to consider, what is needed is a production of signature or authorship, and with this what vanish in the process is complexity, or the potentiality embedded in complexity. Technology isn’t potentiality, as a field or a knowledge it contains its own identity in the last instance, a form of immanence, it processes the capacity for the production of the possibility of radical differentiation. A representation of technology with its maintained complexity must not be either an image of technology, nor an image produced through or by technology but must be the representation of the technology of images, obviously translatable to dance or any form of representation. To unfold such a production however a specific form of rigor is necessary, which is precisely not the rigor of the or an itself or a rigor of technique, but instead a rigor against the self, against itself as technology – a form of rigor that annihilates identity in the first instance, that cancels out forms of convergence or probability, a form of apocalypse, irreversibility or amnesia. However the delicacy of such production of a rigor against itself, considered as a specific formation of immanence, for this immanence to be rigorous, or in the last instance, it cannot be understood as something but instead must be addressed as a continuous undoing of itself, it must in other words be an immanence that is undivided, un approachable and an identity to itself, it must in some or other ways be oracular, or i.e. synonymous to an ever altered in itself amnesia. Immanence or amnesia thus can also be understood as flatus vocis, the abstraction from any form of concreteness except in itself and such, i.e. the referent is erased, could not have been there in the first place or was always there as delusion. Philosophy as we know it, as it addresses immanence through philosophy thus could be said to regard both immanence and amnesia over a Hollywood kind of narrative – philosophy is a waking up from amnesia and the world is it self alike and we take it from there as if nothing has happened.

Following for example Franco Bifo’s thoughts on financial capitalism what has occurred in Western society over the last decade or two is precisely the circulation of abstract, non referential signs, the sign has become financialized and this is the ubiquity we today experience, a sort of coming of amnesia – and this is not Hollywood it is the real shit.

The quest that political and critical theory, or philosophy has taken itself is the elaboration of a solution, a way around the problem from some kind of assumed externality, i.e. a reflected upon immanence, yet standing in front of a predicament where power has been appropriated by amnesia also a solution becomes complacent to the ubiquity that surrounds it. Instead of the preparation of a route around, an unexpected journey, what is needed is a form of monstrous, or better simply monster production, i.e. a production on the terms of amnesia, a recycling of the same as the same, instead of some sort of camouflage – to pose as the other and announcing once presence – this is hyper camouflage – a posing as the same producing against oneself as identity, recognizability, authorship, property etc.

Instead of avant-garde, resistance, alternative, occupation as an experiment nostalgia, if we consider nostalgia as the resurrection of an already hollowed out signifier and thus the production of emptying, of void, of amnesia. Still this production is something, also as a nothing. Nostalgia is nothing circulated as something and in so being nostalgia poses absolutely no threat to our current modes of governance. But if this production is conscious to itself and against itself, is hyper camouflage, it communicates nothing but its own communication, nostalgia has become a chimera of teleology, it looks like it but isn’t. It is pure communicability, it is empty and still it is. Nostalgia is the production of blankness, or better blank. Using a metaphor of copying, nostalgia from the perspective of reproduction is the endless copying of copying until what appears is an absolute blank. In the case of Xerox machine a black surface, it is the production of limitless memory however without relation, without connection, reference or referent but only from the perspective established agency, from the perspective of probability the surface is black and blank but from the horizon of contingency or potentiality the blank is a universe true to itself. Nostalgia in the times of ubiquity becomes the production, not from an outside but from a radical inside, of potentiality. Not the solution, but the non-solution to our present predicament thus implies an endless regress, not to an index but to itself through a rigor of its own annihilation, a becoming non-conscious vis-á-vis established agency. The only survivor – they are many and they don’t hunt, they plague, they lute and mess up – of semio-capital or a semiotic apocalypse is the zombie. The zombie is structural and contingent to it self, they bypass value for the pure production of nothing as nothing against themselves. The zombie is unconditional rigor, without relations, without property, without technique, nameless – unconditionality to itself, continuous amnesia as the production of unlife, of the undoing of consciousness, of identity to itself at the last instance, for the contingent emergence of an altogether different existence.

In the mean time, not in order to free ourselves, not even from ourselves [that’s already a production in consciousness] what we must, is to make an art, improvise a dance, produce a pop, that annihilate ourselves, both the our and the self side. Not an art about zombies, not art made by zombies, but an art that is zombie.

We were free very very free, so free desire left the building. We were so open, so utterly open, so superbly open everything, yes everything became surface, so open we started to baby sit openness. We were so amazingly present and thirteen’s chakra – OMG any form of asymmetry were annihilated already in the antechamber. We had it all – more than almost and Whitney – how could we not we were free free free, and we understood the world and it all – we could see everything and we were one with nature [but in the wrong way, oups] – we were so ultra make me one with everything and Gordon Matta-Clark parsley started growing out of our ears [Matta-Clark, Jezuz equivalent to having a crush on Martha Rosler – Food meets Semiotics of the Kitchen, nausea alert nausea alert – a hole made in a freakin house and the reverse, a hole taken from a freakin house called garage sale – deep – OD on Frankfurt school, blame imperialism from the inside – it wasn’t me – and out comes a fully developed hoarder – nausea alert nausea alert]. The obliteration of differentiation made it impossible to produce anything at all except – beyond creativity which wasn’t open enough, which is already conscious and an engagement with decision making processes – there was nothing left nothing nada at all, there was only authenticity, a full body presence with a big ass P. And btw, Vito Acconci’s dress code, we were so free we let his hair do pass – and that next to the jacket he wears in “Following Piece” – stop thinking that stuff was good. You know something, that schtuff when Vito is holding on to his penis under some shipboard slope –it’s not good, it’s not brill, it’s not deterritorializing, it’s not even for a millisecond cool, it’s not half way groovy, it’s not even halfway Sophia Coppola – you know Seedbed wasn’t the shit not even in 1972, what was doesn’t matter but fuck it, you know what, Vito in seventy-two was approximately as mind blowing as urgency in 2013, not at all, and I repeated – not at all.

But, even though it might just appear fa-fa-far fetched perhaps there is a connection between the two, freedom and ubiquity? In our catalogue the endless freedom we experienced in the 70s respectively the emergence of a limitless all over the place financial capitalism.

These situations are in fact identical it’s just that they are each other’s reversal. The seventies found itself caught in a moment where the struggle for emancipation and freedom was won. What are we doing now? Shit. Our current predicament is more of the same but the opposite, namely, we found ourselves in an endless everything is everything – the whole chebang has been financialized including potentiality and we’ve all became young girls – where openness itself has become an openness. Ubiquity, simultaneity, FB and endless availability has become a prison and no choice is better, worse, good or bad, success or failure, they are both and interchangeable all the time. We are so fucked. Urgency thus shows up as a nice opportunity [but exactly only opportunity] departing from known and established conventions and modes of quality assessment, becoming a dark horse, a high odds bet, risk thingy [dude, you are so up the wall], but it plays in no respect on another ball field but moves straight into and likes it. Urgency to what, bitch? To whatever and to anything all the time, aha. Urgency is a feel good for suckers, that believe their sexuality is experimental just because there is a sex toy shop in their city.

Wie man sich better, so liegt man – the seventies found itself in bed with freedom and didn’t know how to get the fuck out. Tun was du wilst mit mir [do to me whatever you like], who wouldn’t get scared shitless by somebody whispering that when the lights are off. Freaky, you just ended up naked with some kind of meta-serial killer, this is Catherine Tramell in a death match with Sharon Stone, and you are sipping on a Red Bull. Twenty-thirteen aha check it out found ubiquity in the bed, paralyzed, ch’terical and totally beyond “-Ehhh, where am I about to sleep?”, and ubiquity responds with a snake like vocalization, totally digital but mystically made to sound exactly like you think you remember your mothers voice when she passed language from one living being to anther [you sentimental creep. Bifo pö-lease, don’t go there] “-Here come, next to me, I will take care of you. I’m new like everything else and more recognizable than your ex”, mesmerized I crawl into bed. “-No no no”, I shout “-I have urgency…” and crawl into bed happy with myself. Justified, you little cowards.

I like this, so the seventies, the establishment of a feedback mechanism in the name of freedom that surveilles itself, a totalitarian freedom or simply utopia, which obviously is not a place we want to be in [at least not to begin with or for more than a really really short moment, at least not a utopia made into exhibitions and Danish artists born in the earlier 60s, SVP, or even worse you know like advertised on the www you use to download movies…], in particular as it obliterates desire, Freudian or D/G machines. Right now, right now this very moment on the other hand, the establishment of a mechanism – today called social network – that produce infinite amounts of freedom as financialized abstract value, who doesn’t surveille but instead transforms the subject into a totalitarian, or in-total, producer of itself as free.

Pas de tout, the referent didn’t blow up post 2008, or with whatever riots in London, Paris or Occupy. No way, the referent wasn’t there ever, we just believed it was, and wanted to. The point is not if or not it was around, the point is how it wasn’t, through forms of asymmetry, vis-á-vis freedom, ubiquity, apocalypse or a burning freaking bush. There’s no way out, not even a small one, not even a vague path through the forest, not even a adventures journey financialized by some hobbit and New Zealand. And it gets better we can’t even build one, we can’t even start trying. In Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of The Snark” the captain shows up with a map that is an absolute blank and everybody is happy and overwhelmed cuz as we know conventional signs only bring us to places contained within the matrix of those signs. Already in the seventies that map was fucked and a smooth matrix of freedom, today ladies an gents that map is known as financial capitalism and we are fucked, and mind you improvisation is not gonna be much help, and yet – look at this – only improvisation will brings us out into the open – fuck openness it’s just a way of being [Maayan] – openness tells us life is okay, that consciousness one day will bring us onto the right path. No no no, it’s worse we have to insist on a radical open – everything I conclude works is not enough not even close. The open is not ubiquitous, it’s not free or –dom, it’s worse its not even that, not even all over the place and all of it at the same time, it’s worse – if openness is something it’s a werewolf dressed up like Benicio Del Toro – and Obama playing the role of Anthony Hopkins – a werewolf every once a months, then the open is a vampire and every fuckin day [and I’m in love with her].

Am I just getting old? For twenty years I have nourished an excessive distrust in anybody who and every thing improvisation. Fought it on endless battlefields, dismissed it categorically or even worse. I’ve been called names, and not only just a few because of this obsessive campaign like I was some sort of McCarthy of dance bingbong or a wahnsinnig dictator with a jazz beard [donno where that jazz thing came from but don’t you think a dictator with a jazz beard must be the worst of the worst] ready to lose every and all of it just to get improvisation out of my precious, and now and now and aging grey I’ve turned so weak I can’t carry my arguments, so grandfatherly my arguments have turned into withered parchment, soft ass and afraid of losing my last associates, last comrades, that I have given up on my dicta, lost sight of my tight ass arguments and gone yellow. Probably, but in the mean time…

One more time, there is a hell uf a difference, between liberty’s rigor and liberty itself, there’s light years between openness and the open. Liberty is easy peasy Japanesey and gives the subject opportunities of going on as if nothing has happened. Liberty in this sense implies nothing else than a tiny expansion of what was already possible, even and especially in relation to what already was possible, voila liberty is the expansion of the already available, in other words it feels great or at least good but désolé liberty is just fine, and like plaster in a stimulating pastel color. What needs to be considered is not liberty itself but what consequences new or altered forms of liberty necessarily produces. Liberty’s rigor is the pursuit of necessity in relation to altered circumstances of navigational capacities. We must not understand liberty as an open sexual relation, meaning, yeah now I can expand my territory to include the plumber, James Franco, Penélope and somebody with red hair [that would be really sweet and smiling], on the contrary liberty must be taken far more serious, way more serious, in the sense that it is not an expansion but rather an entirely new territory, it’s not another map, it’s an all together different map if at all a map. The introduction of some or other kind of liberty, through whatever means, is not the establishment of new opportunities, not at all, it’s rather the emergence of new forms of struggle, and new forms implies new means, new weapons – not simple change like flip siding whatever and continuing to do the same, no no liberty is or should mean the unconditional transformation of change itself. Liberty’s rigor in other words implies a process of becoming foreign to oneself and or to ones territory. So no, a rigorous open sexual or whatever relation, is not a yippee boogie-woogie time, essactly not it is instead a means to question the “essence” of sexuality itself. Liberty’s rigor in this respect might just make you not do the horizontal with any of them. Not even a little bit Penélope? Perhaps, just to be tedious yet another option could be to consider the difference, liberty is a probabilistic and it’s rigor implies a transference to contingent differentiation.

It’s obviously no accident that our current Western society is all up to liberty understood as expansion or the already available, it’s after all hand in glove with neoliberal governance especially with the addition, that seems currently ubiquitous, that liberty always is a concern for or of the subject, the individual. Who the hell today, would bother to care about the liberty of something grander than the subject – oh shit I forgot there is nothing grander than the subject, no bigger cause than subject. Oh no no, don’t misunderstand, the notion that the subject is the shit, that the obsession with certain modalities of subjectivity in our current predicament is in any way synonymous with being ego-centered, selfish, a rotten ass hole don’t give a shit about others and so on. No no these forms of subjectivity, this addiction to the subject is rather a state and corporate sanction to us all – and therefore democratic – to be absolutely and endlessly occupied with one’s own participation in the world. We live in a world where excessive self-obsessivity has become has become the preferred mode of care of the self, or even better where compulsive identity boosting has become a generous gesture.

Improvisation appears on the map somewhere in the mid 60s, sure thang dance has always been free and open mindedly executed but the circumstances for freer dance either Isadora D or whatever mystical nude shit they did in Germany at the wrong moment and with an American west cost thing as a precursor it is first with the 60s that improvisation coagulates into a terrain of practices and gains a sort of autonomous vocabulary [both in the sense of dancing but also and perhaps more importantly in language]. That improvisation appears at this particular historical moment is obviously not an accident, but correlates to all kind of emancipatory or liberation movements appearing here and there, especially in the US, from the early mid 50s, make that Cage or Pollock, Miles Davies or Allen Ginsburg in the arts and at least a handful in respect of subjectivity and life – women’s, educational, sexual, black and a general emancipation form a hyper homogenized America society, with hippies, self-precarisation, freeish education on a farm somewhere and organic life in the bush. These are the circumstances for the elaboration of dance’s relation to improvisation.

One would thus think that practitioners active in the time was like deep in a critical practice but were they? Or even better perhaps they have modulated their responses to what it all was w in order to produce enough mystery around themselves to still be relevant. In a panel discussion with Steve Paxton a few years ago, I made the slight mistake of asking him about exactly above and the circumstances for the NYC activities at the time. If those kids were discussing and actively questioning the epistemology of dance and it’s relation to other movements of emancipation, or even the politically necessity of an emancipated dance field. The expected or not intellectual articulation however was cancelled out by Steve responding: “Nah, you know we were just imagining stuff, like little fluffy clouds, mystical landscapes and rainbows.” It’s certainly beautiful and charming for sure, and hopefully just Mr Paxton who doesn’t want to stand out like some smart ass dude that wasn’t just body and more body. It’s indeed insane how deadpan he performs in the films form the 70s, producing a body seemingly void of subjectivity and this is perhaps what makes his response exiting, not mentioning rainbows and shit in the sense of enhancement of the subject or the self, but rather sort of psychedelic motive as a means of vanishing all together, of an annihilation of the subject.

But Paxton a side and with him his anti-locational response, an etymology can be traced. Improvisation in the late 60s and perhaps a decade or two further towards our own time had a job. A job which was to emancipate dance from a double violence. First a job to free the dancing subject from the hyper striated expressions of, either Balanchine, Cunningham or Graham, i.e. to free the dancer from the prison of generalized technique, hierarchical decision makings, choreography etc. and so on. It was a matter of emancipating the dancer from the hardship of choreography. Secondly and expanded this emancipation correlates to society in general, the emancipation of the dancer from choreography equally implies the emancipation of the subject, the individual from the, or some, homogenizing characteristics of the society at hand. Improvisation becomes a means to free the human, the person, the subject from his own chains.

This is all great and superbly lovely, improvisation totally had a job and I believer it did it successfully. Improvisation as concert dance, as display, further become a form of expression of “pure” creativity. This was obviously important in a world homogenized into so to say The Society, or where creativity must be understood as a scarcity. To attend a performance of improvisation dance implied to go check out a promise of other kinds of life, of other kinds of relations to one’s body, to augmented opportunities for being an individual, a woman, a sexual being that could surface desire and lust. Yes, even dance improvisation combined with some contemporary wkd-ish music, or like holy bananas a dancer improvising next to, through, between and in association with a double bass improviser could go through the eye of the needle of the aesthetically acceptable. Think about that, yes, think about that twice – and it was phantastic. It was a time where one could say the word exploration without being deadly ashamed or apologizing afterwards – “Oups, that came out wrong…”

Dance at this time prior to identity politics was also something that at least initially and with a certain ignorance could be experienced as autonomous, as something that was not comprised in language and not all the way embedded in text, signification and meaning production. Life was lovely and dance was somewhere hooked up with potentiality. At this time liberty itself was totally d’accord, whatever liberty proposed was a liberation to forms of recognizable resistances. To be creative, to fantasize was in itself an endeavor, something worth the trouble and that didn’t come easy.

And yes it was our obligation to practice open relations, sleep around and insist on experimental sex. A multiplicity of sexual partners, the denial of sexuality coagulating into family formations were in itself creative, emancipatory, a political necessity. Then, when you had braids and we didn’t know about men with longer hair life was amazing, and we went home together free and real. We improvised and could pride ourselves of Marxist ideals all the way to the boogie-woogie.